Other marine mammals have etiquette standards. The Whale Sense or Dolphin Smart programs give tourists list of operators that play nice. But who’s smart about the 3,000 manatees left in the U.S.?

As an endangered species and marine mammal, manatees area already supposed to be protected, but go on YouTube and search “manatee harassment.” You’ll find videos of tourists coralling and chasing manatees, separating the mom and calf and even trying to ride or kick them. It’s like Crystal River, FL, tour operators live in a 1950s world where they feel entitled to sell the experience of touching, petting and scratching manatees. Do they then drive home without seatbelts into a house lined with asbestos and eat canned soup casserole for dinner? Haven’t they heard that’s not how you treat wild animals?

“It’s this culture of everybody that come to Crystal River,” says manatee advocate Tracy Colson. “It’s well-advertised that this is the only place where you can touch a manatee. It’s the only place in the world where you can interact with an endangered species.”

“There’s something to the swim with- programs that would be a great help to the mantee,” says Colson. “If you have that magical experience, it’s going to make you a strong advocate.” I get as excited as anyone seeing a wild animal, so it’s easy to see how some one could become over eager to make a manatee connection. But, like most animal tourists I know, I don’t want to do anything that hurts the animal. So I asked Tracy to give out-of-towners some tips so we don’t unwittingly help the bad guys. It can be hard to pick out a good tour because many go through the motions.

The programs that reign in whale and dolphin tours amount to this: don’t bother the animals or make it look like you do in your ads. You stand still and if the animal wants to come close, it will.

TIPS ON FINDING A RESPONSIBLE TOUR

* Ask them if you’re allowed to touch or approach a manatee.

* Is their website all about party and adventure?

* Do they show pictures of people petting, kissing, tickling, riding or otherwise molesting manatees?

* Look for a small operation and small boat. While it’s better for whales if everyone is on one big boat, it’s better for manatees if there are small boats and small groups, where the mob mentality hasn’t taken over.

Just a couple hours west of Chicago a herd of bison is taking the winter off from delighting kids. Wildlife Prairie State Park–a unique combination of wildlife center, praire re-enactment and park–closes for the winter.

The animals in big herds, the elk and bison, are taken off public display to give their summer pastures a rest, says park spokesperson Kelly Stickelmaier. The enclosures (80 acres for the elk) are big enough to approximate a natural setting, but not so huge you can’t see them. (Just check the park’s very active flickr group and you can see how much of the animals visitors can see.)

The park’s 18 bison are especially cooperative, coming up to the viewing stand, where they’re fed at 1 o’clock. “The elk are a little more persnickety, especially the boys,” Stickelmaier says. Because the bison herd reproduces, the park sells off however many are born each year to keep the total at 18.

I don’t think I’ve seen another wildlife park that has badgers–and, believe me, I’ve looked. They’ve also have otters, eagles that came in through wildlife rehabilitation, skunks, bobcats and cougars.

Philantrhopist Will Rutherford started the park in 1978 mainly as a kind of rehab area for animals from the Brookfield Zoo. The park eventually shifted to native animals, then Rutherford gave the park to the state in 2000.

Rutherford’s family’s Forest Park Foundation still supports the park, the Peoria Journal-Star says, but it can’t make up for all the money now disgraced governor Rod Blagojevich cut from their budget. In one of his last acts, Blago used a line item veto to chop $828,000 from the Peoria park’s $1.2 million budget, prompting worries it would close, according to Prairie State Outdoors. The park has come up with some creative ways to raise and save money to support their animals. You can still visit while the park is closed in winter if you become a member or rent a cottage. You can rent out a room for a business meeting or party–maybe even the one that looks out on the wolf pen. And they’ve even loaned out a couple bears. Certainly it’s worth a visit and maybe a membership.

The Bahamas are down to only six wild horses. Genetic tests show they’re Spanish Barbs who improbably survived for generations in pine forest and scrub.

Then logging companies came–clearing forests, bringing hunting dogs and flushing the horses into view, according to Equiworld.net. “The road put in by the logging company opened the area up to local hunters. When a child died due to her own misbehavior with a horse, locals tried to slaughter all the horses. Three were rescued and placed on the [Bahamas Star Farms] and as their numbers grew they were released back into the regenerating forest,” sayMilanne Rehor who founded Wild Horses of Abaco.

Rehor desrcribes herself as a once “horse crazy child,” set out to find them after reading of them in a sailing guide. She eventually found that they were real, but about to disappear. In 1982 there were 35 Abaco horses. In 2005, the Bahaman government claims it shut down Bahamas Star Farms because of a citrus canker; Rehor says the area was clear cut. Now a mysterious illness is killing off the horses. “It has been invaded by Brazilian pepper and Lantana Sage, the latter deadly to animals. The horses know to not eat it, but it became so thick in one forage area that two ingested it by accident and died,” Rehor says. “The area has been closed off and there have been no more loses.”

Today a federal judge in Washington will hear wild horse advocates argue that 2,700 wild horses in Nevada shouldn’t be rounded up and held indefinitely in holding pens. Seems like an obvious choice, but under the antiquated U.S. wild horse protections, it’s not.

Wild horses in America are like a beleagured employee who has somehow gotten stuck with a totally inappropriate manager who doesn’t understand their charm or why he can’t just get rid of them. Horses somehow fall under the The Bureau of Land Management, despite its mission to provide land for energy producers, cattle ranchers and miners. Since 2000 the BLM has gone on a spree of rounding up wild horses, creating what has become a vast, money-sucking collection of 11,000 in corrals and 22,000 in Midwestern pastures–the same number that run wild. In 2008 the BLM started openly talking about mass euthanasia for mustangs. (To save them, Madeleine Pickens proposed a private sanctuary.)

The BLM announced its final decision Monday to remove 2,700 horses near Reno in what it calls the Calico Complex Round-up, which includes five herd management areas: Black Rock Range East and West, Calico Mountains, Granite Range, and Warm Springs Canyon. The BLM decided the right amount of horses for the area is 600-900 and it counts about 3,000 out there.

If they don’t round up the horses, some might die, the BLM threatens. Well, yeah, they’re wild animals. That’s what they do. It’s not as if this is a magical species that would continue to multiply until there were 42 million horses in Nevada, trampling the state into dust. Populations go through cycles; predators like coyotes and coywolves step up–unless you mess with the cycle. The anti-horse, pro-cattle contingent the BLM supports seems to have taken matters into its own hands, shooting six mustangs, whose carcasses were found this month.

Horse advocates don’t trust their target number, their count, their management of public lands (they’ve been steadily eroding the horses’ range) or their intentions. Wild horse ecologist Craig Downer and In Defense of Animals are suing to stop the round-up and stop the BLM’s perpetual short-changing of horses in the way it manages land. A bill that passed the house this spring would fix some of these very problems with the BLM’s management of wild horses (though still leave them to the BLM). Pickens and other horse lovers are trying to get it passed in the Senate right now.

Many researchers have reported that octopi left in the lab at night will escape their tank, go eat another fish, then go back home to cover their tracks. Apparently they’re not smart enough to catch onto security cameras. Yet.

The Independent report that Portobello Aquarium in New Zealand had many such incidents and in one case just decided to release an escape artist octopus named Sid. Matthew Crane, Portobello’s senior aquarist, explained that people are just starting to realize how clever octopi are. “Some people compare them with dogs, because you can train them to open a jar, for instance, particularly if it’s got a crab in it.”

So, remember, the octopus isn’t dumb. That’s just what they want you to think.

You’ve got one day to swoop in and buy lunch with a celebrity, or at least Dennis Kucinich, to support cows, pigs, chickens and other farm animals. his time it’s at and for Farm Sanctuary, which fights for animals stuck in agribusiness. Right now you can get a Kim Bassinger-signed shirt for $125 and there are still some good deals for the chance to meet Joan Jett or the B-52s before a concert.

Ellen isn’t selling her personal stuff–just two VIP tickets to Ellen. But it is a personal cause. Ellen is vegan and explains on her website why: “I personally chose to go vegan because I educated myself on factory farming and cruelty to animals, and I suddenly realized that what was on my plate were living things, with feelings. And I just couldn’t disconnect myself from it any longer.”

Australian biologist Michael Archer is hellbent to stop or reverse human-caused extinctions one way another. First he tried resurrecting the Thylacine, the mascot of tragically extinct animals, using DNA from museum specimens. Now, according to Time, he’s close to getting permission to let regular people keep endangered species as pets so they won’t go extinct in the wild.

Archer, a professor at the School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales, has been pushing this idea to the public for a while, as this 2000 article from the Telegraph shows. He told both publications something like: “No animal that human beings have turned into a domestic pet has ever died out. It’s the ones we don’t value that become extinct.”

In particular Archer wants to try to save the quoll, a small marsupial with the spotted coat of a fawn. Quolls eat bugs, grubs and mice, but they’ve been wiped out by fox and cats. Cats often carry toxoplasmosis, which makes female quolls infertile, according the Warrawong Wildlife Sanctuary, which that has been arduously them since 1986.

Predictably, as when anybody wants to try some last-chance idea to help an animal, another animal lover pops up to criticize and impede them. In this case, animal rights activists worry it will play into the hands of the pet industry. More seriously scientists worry whether people will be able to provide appropriate homes.

Captive breeding has already saved or helped many species, including the California condors, European bison and bald eagle. The Przewalski’s horse, among other animals, only survives in captivity. The Bali starling, red wolf and black-footed ferret are making their way back. (Others have experimented with the more radical back-breeding, which uses remnant animals and those in other species that look like them.) The big shift here is moving the animals from pristine, scientific, objective settings to messy, emotional homes. (Though there is talk of licensing.)

“Quails make better pets than domestic cats!” says an information sheet from Warrawong. Archer has raised quolls and gushes over the experience. Meanwhile, the severalquollspecies have various alarming designations from the IUCN, but there are thousands left, not just a handful, so there’s still some time–and a little room to experiment with a radical idea of keeping them as pets. North America might still have a native, wild parrot if somebody had just taken on the now extinct Carolina Parakeet as a companion.

As for the Thylacine, it’s been a bumpy road. The project was called off because the DNA was too ragged, but it’s restarted and has made some progress with genetic mapping. Certainly saving quolls as pets would be easier than Archer’s other project of resurrecting the Thylacine through DNA.